How to Catch A Mole

When CIA operations were compromised by traitors like Aldrich Ames, sources paid with their lives.

By

Christina Shelton

Dec. 11, 2012 4:26 p.m. ET

Aldrich Ames, a Central Intelligence Agency officer for close to three decades, was arrested in February 1994 for espionage. Ames had used his position at the CIA's Directorate of Operations to pass information to Moscow, compromising Soviet sources working for the agency. For his treason, Ames was convicted and received a life sentence without parole.

Sandra Grimes
and
Jeanne Vertefeuille,
longtime veterans of the CIA's clandestine service, were at the forefront of a small group assigned the mission, in early 1991, to expose the traitor in their midst. Ms. Grimes and Ms. Vertefeuille dedicate their revealing book about the Ames affair to GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) Gen.
Dmitriy Polyakov
and others who risked their lives only to be sold out by Ames.

The authors present themselves as advocates for their heroes, whose stories they felt deserved to be told. This is especially the case with Gen. Polyakov, whom they considered the "Crown Jewel." He provided outstanding positive intelligence for over two decades (1962-85). In the early 1960s, he even helped expose four American servicemen who were spying for the GRU. Polyakov was first compromised by FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen in 1979 and subsequently recalled from duty. But it was after Ames also identified him in 1985 as a spy for the U.S. that he was executed.

The first half of "Circle of Treason" focuses on the sources Ames exposed. He was responsible for the execution of at least 10 Soviet intelligence officials and the imprisonment of others. The authors provide intriguing insights into the background and tradecraft of a number of productive operations the CIA ran against the GRU and KGB from the 1960s through the 1980s. They also show how, when operations went wrong or were compromised by traitors, sources paid with their lives.

Take the case of
Adolf Tolkachev,
an engineer who, from 1978 to 1985, passed a great deal of information on Soviet missiles, radars and other military systems. "Tolkachev produced hundreds of rolls of film," the authors write. "It sometimes changed the direction of our own research and development and, by doing so, saved the U.S. government billions of dollars." Money was of course an important motivating factor for Tolkachev, but, the authors note, so was anti-communism: "If he had not had a security clearance, he would have been active as a dissident." Tolkachev's heroism was answered with execution in 1986 after another CIA traitor,
Edward Lee Howard,
gave him up to the KGB. "In the unlikely event that the KGB had any unanswered questions after Howard's reporting," the authors write, "Ames would have been in a position to fill the gaps."

ENLARGE

Circle of Treason

Then there was the problem of defectors deliberately sent by Moscow to provide false or misleading information to the West.
Yuri Nosenko,
for example, defected in 1964 on the heels of Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had warned that any defections after his would be false and designed by the KGB to mislead the West about Golitsyn's information. The authors use such cases to draw attention to a decades-long CIA bureaucratic controversy. On one side were those, like longtime counterintelligence chief
James Angleton,
who favored the so-called "Monster Plot" theory, holding that most defectors were in fact controlled by the KGB. On the other side were those, including the authors, who generally discounted the possibility of such penetrations. They believed that Moscow wouldn't trust Soviet intelligence officers with knowledge of state secrets to come under the control of a foreign service. It is a debate that will likely remain unsettled until the KGB archives are fully opened.

The second half of the book describes actions that the agency took when the agency's Soviet operations started hemorrhaging after June 1985. The CIA had to determine if there was a mole inside the organization, if a communications penetration existed, or if KGB operations were being designed to mislead the agency about its source losses. To catch the mole, the agency team drew up a shortlist of potential traitors based on access to information. The spy-hunters then "followed the money" and found that Ames and his second wife, Rosario, were living well beyond their known incomes. The team also compared the dates of Ames's official visits with Soviet embassy personnel against the dates of large deposits in his bank account. There was a direct correlation. (The financial forensic methods pioneered by the team that caught Ames are still in use today.)

The authors note that the hunt for this traitor, one of their former co-workers, took nine years—far longer than planned—due to bureaucratic roadblocks and shifting priorities. But they give little consideration to the CIA's internal resistance to the idea that one of the agency's own could be culpable.

The book also comes up short when analyzing the problem of defectors dispatched and controlled by the Soviets. The authors' insistence on the idea that false defections were almost nonexistent doesn't square with the Soviet proclivity for deception and disinformation. As the authors concede, for example, KGB officer
Aleksandr Zhomov,
who attempted to defect in 1988, was actually sent "to deceive us" on the subject of the 1985 losses. The author's theory also fails to account for the many unsolved anomalies, contradictions and coincidences surrounding specific defector cases.

Even so, "Circle of Treason" has the advantage of being written by two intelligence professionals, not by academics or journalists, and thus is an authoritative account of the Soviet sources that were providing the U.S. with invaluable information during the Cold War until Ames betrayed them. Because classified material on operational cases was going to be made public, the CIA took over three years to approve the book's publication. The authors note that 90% of the disputes were resolved in their favor.

Ms. Shelton served for three decades as a Soviet analyst in various intelligence agencies, including as a chief of the Soviet Branch, Counterintelligence Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the author of "Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason" (Threshold Editions, 2012).

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